


sharp and glorious thorn

by choomchoom



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Steven Universe: The Movie, Steven Universe: The Movie Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 08:00:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20542766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: If Rose came back now, Pearl wouldn’t fall into her arms. She doesn’t know what she would do, and it leaves her unsteady. The anger seems like it could swallow her whole, sometimes, and in those moments she thinks about how she should have been angry this whole time.After Spinel, Pearl talks to her friends. She copes.





	sharp and glorious thorn

**Author's Note:**

> ['another great idea from ME' meme except instead of 'idea' it says 'pearl angst episode coda']
> 
> title is from Shrike by Hozier

“Is Pearl okay?” Amethyst asks. It’s the fourth day since Spinel left with the diamonds, and the fourth day that Pearl has immediately warped somewhere after they get back from working on rebuilding New Homeworld and Beach City.

“Ask her yourself,” Garnet responds.

**

Amethyst warps to the sky arena first; she’s not quite sure why. She knows of a couple hiding places of Pearl’s, and this isn’t one of them.

Her hunch is correct, though, and she finds Pearl dueling a copy of herself, its eyes blazing red as Pearl furiously parries against it. Amethyst creeps up to the edge of the arena to watch. Pearl looks nearly outmatched, at first, and then Amethyst realizes that she simply isn’t trying very hard.

Amethyst allows one close call – a strike from the clone that Pearl avoids by tripping over her own feet and falling to the ground and then parrying from there – and then steps in. The clone goes down with one hit from Amethyst’s wrecking balls, and Pearl’s sword swipes uselessly at the air before coming to rest near Pearl’s feet.

“The point of training is to defeat the enemy, not to make them go away,” Pearl lectures.

“That didn’t look like training.”

Pearl shakes her head, doesn’t argue. She looks awful, Amethyst observes as she follows Pearl toward the benches at the side of the arena. Exhausted, unsurprisingly, and there’s a raw sadness on her face that gives Amethyst pause, that Amethyst isn’t entirely sure how to cope with.

“You okay, P?”

They’ve reached the benches, and Amethyst sits down next to Pearl, who examines the sword and unceremoniously tucks it back into her gem before curling in on herself. “I should be. Nothing’s wrong, right? The world’s saved. We’re rebuilding.”

“You don’t seem okay.”

Pearl chuckles at that, and it almost sounds normal. “Was it terrifying for you? Being new again?”

If she’s honest… “Not really. When I was first formed, I was all by myself. This time, I had all of you around. Greg paid attention to me. Steven cared enough to come find me when I wandered off. It was…I wish it had been like that the first time, but I’m glad I have those memories.” She runs through the events of the day in her head. “I can _super _understand why it wouldn’t be that way for you, though.”

Pearl nods. “There’s something I want to talk to Greg about, but…I kind of also never want to see him again. After he saw me like that.”

“I get it, P, but you can’t avoid Greg forever.” Amethyst put a reassuring hand on Pearl’s back at her heavy sigh. “From what I remember, all he cared about was keeping us safe and getting our memories back.”

Pearl collapses a little, then, and Amethyst takes the excuse to fold Pearl into her arms. Pearl clings, sobs hitching in her throat. “We were becoming _friends_,” Pearl says. “What if he liked me better like that?”

Amethyst pulls back just so she can look Pearl in the eyes as she says “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

Pearl’s shoulders relax a fraction as she laughs, and when Amethyst stands up to go back to the temple, Pearl stands too.

**

“Hello.”

Pearl’s voice is the first indication Greg has of her presence, and Greg startles so bad he bonks his head against the bottom of the van’s engine. He rolls out from under the van, blinking in the sunlight, with a hand pressed against the forming bruise on his forehead. “Jeez, Pearl, warn a guy next time.”

“I didn’t mean to startle you.” Pearl’s arms are crossed tightly over her chest. Greg clambers to his feet and opens the back doors of the still-dysfunctional van so they have a place to sit. “What’s wrong with the van?” Pearl asks, perching next to Greg and somehow managing to keep all the tension that had been in her posture.

“I think the engine’s waterlogged from the flood,” Greg says. “But it’s possible some dirt got inside something. I’ll have to take it apart to be sure.”

Pearl turns completely away from him. “I could take a look.”

“I’d appreciate the help, if you’re up for it. But I don’t think that’s what you came here to talk about.”

She’s radiating tension and unhappiness, and it hurts a little to look at her. Greg tries to figure out if there’s something she’s waiting for him to say, but finally, she speaks. “Was Rose ever…unkind to you?”

It seems like the kind of question Greg ought to take a moment to think about, so he does. “She kept a lot of secrets from me. To an extent, I understood that, and accepted it but…do you really want to know?”

Without looking at him, Pearl nods.

“I love Steven more than _anything_, Pearl, anything. You know that. But when Rose told me that she was having him…I hadn’t even known that she could do that. If she’d asked me if I wanted to have a kid, if I was ready to be a dad…I would have said no. But she didn’t give me a say. When things like that happened, when she was…incommunicative, I always chalked it up to a cultural thing. But since I’ve gotten to know the rest of you better…I know that it isn’t. You and Garnet and Amethyst have kept secrets from me, yeah, but not just so you’d get your way. Not like she did.” He pauses. Pearl is unreadable, still turned away from him with her arms crossed. “Is that the kind of thing you were asking about?”

She nods.

“Steven told me what happened to Spinel.”

At that, Pearl flinches. “Spinel didn’t deserve that,” she says, and Greg has no idea if she’s only talking about Spinel.

Either way… “No, she didn’t.”

Pearl processes that for a long moment, her hands loosening from their grip on her upper arms to pick up a screwdriver that’s laying on the floor of the van. “I can take a look at the truck now,” she says, standing up and offering him a hand. She wouldn’t have done that a few years ago, and he can’t help but smile, despite the content of the conversation, at how far they’ve come. She walks around to the side where Greg had left his bag of tools and plucks a few out, then gets under the van. “I also wanted to thank you,” she says, when Greg again can’t see her face. “For being so kind to me when I was…like that.”

“It’s nothing more than you deserve, Pearl,” he says, and she can see her flinch at that even with half of her beneath the van. “And I’ve gotta say, I prefer you like this.”

“There’s mud in the starter casing,” Pearl says. A long moment passes, and Greg barely hears her when she adds, “I do too.”

**

When Garnet walks out of the core of the temple into Steven’s room, Pearl will be staring at the picture of Rose that hangs next to the door. If Garnet waits another minute, Pearl will draw her spear and throw it at the picture, breaking the frame beyond repair and tearing the picture itself. She’ll be flooded with guilt and inconsolable over it, and still she’ll try to choke it down, try to characterize her anger as some personal inadequacy.

Garnet walks out of the temple in time and heads straight for her, gathering her into a hug. Pearl goes almost limp in her arms, as if relieved that she hadn’t done what she’d been about to do. She’s crying, pointlessly trying to keep Garnet from seeing. Garnet tightens her hold and Pearl’s arms snake around her waist, and they stay like that for a long while.

“I don’t know if I love her anymore,” Pearl whispers, as if she doesn’t really want Garnet to hear.

“You don’t have to love her.” Garnet puts on her most authoritative voice to say it, lacing the words with the weight of her belief that it’s _true_.

**

If Rose came back now, Pearl wouldn’t fall into her arms. She doesn’t know what she would do, and it leaves her unsteady. The anger seems like it could swallow her whole, sometimes, and in those moments she thinks about how she should have been angry this whole time.

She should have been angry when Rose pushed Pearl’s hands over her lips, guaranteeing her secret would stay hers alone to keep, but all she’d felt then was the softness of Rose’s touch on her hands and the sting of Rose’s distrust, a small, pitiful wish that Rose hadn’t felt the need to use magic to keep her silent.

She should have been angry every time Rose almost left her, every time she expected Pearl to be passive and encouraging as she gushed about some new human. She’s only hated herself, back then, for not being enough to satisfy Rose.

She should have been angry when Rose had asked her to stay and fight for earth – the moment she realized that Rose only ever asked her questions that she already knew the answer to.

**

She’s careful, this time, for once, to keep it all away from Steven. She pets the cat and cries in her room and spars with Bismuth and helps with the rebuilding. Eventually, though, they’re alone in the house together and there’s nothing else to talk about. Nothing else that’s on either of their minds.

“How are you doing?” Pearl asks. Friendship with Greg has taught her how young Steven still is, what’s unfair to pile on him. She has other people, now, to help her. She needs to support him.

He opens his mouth to answer, pasting on a smile, then he seems to get a look at her expression and realize that she’s serious. His smile disappears. “I can’t stop thinking about what she did to Spinel.” Not _mom_, not _Rose_, not _Pink_, only _she_.

“Me too,” Pearl says, because there’s not much else she can think to say.

“Pearl, did –” He stops, and Pearl goes back to stirring the pot she has on the stove, bracing herself for whatever he’s about to ask. “Did she have anyone else? Is there anyone else who might be out there, waiting, or, or plotting revenge? Spinel has said that she was lonely on Homeworld but the Diamonds – they didn’t always treat her well, but they loved her too.”

Pearl turns off the burner so that she can shut her eyes and grip the edges of the counter hard enough for them to dig into her palms. She remembers Rose’s stories of being locked away for misbehaving, sometimes for so long she would wonder if the other diamonds had forgotten about her. She remembers her own fury at those stories, tinged indelibly with her love for Rose, her shock at how anyone could do that to someone so wonderful.

When Rose had told her those stories, they’d been on Earth. Rose had basked in Pearl’s pity and fussing while Spinel had stood, waiting, in a cage of Rose’s making. A beautiful cage was still a cage. Rose, if anyone, had understood that.

“Pearl?”

She tries to settle herself. Steven has asked her a question, and he deserves the answer. Unfortunately, she has to give him the honest one. “I don’t know,” she says. “She was…Steven, she was so easy to love. There may well be other people out there she’s hurt, and maybe they’ll find us, one day. There’s no one I can think of, specifically, but…I don’t know.” She never would have expected Spinel. She’d assumed, this whole time, that the other diamonds had destroyed her as punishment, when Pink had rebelled.

“She wasn’t all bad, Steven.” Thinking of the rebellion reminds her of that, and it’s something else he deserves to hear. “If it weren’t for her, life on Earth would have been destroyed long ago. She hurt people, but she also built the Crystal Gems. She started the task that you finished, making the gems respect other life forms.”

“I know all that,” Steven says. “And thanks.”

**

_The love of her life_, they’d called her, back at the concert, when Pearl had been reset.

Was she?

Wasn’t she?

Pearl rebuilds. She cooks for Steven and learns bass from Greg and wonders who Rose – Pink – ever really loved, and what that love meant. She wonders if she should bother wondering.

Eventually, she lets herself move on.


End file.
